Isadora Page 8

  When he expressed his sorrow for the children’s accident, she pretended not to understand his Italian. He repeated his condolences in English, and Elizabeth looked back down at the photo album as if she could turn the page on the entire discussion. But it got even worse; Romano excused himself to speak with Isadora directly, and then the whole thing happened with the tea and she brushed him off. It looked for a moment as if he would follow her up the stairs, and Elizabeth had to hold the arm of her own chair not to spring up after him.

  She found herself hoping that Isadora really was sick with something that might keep her in bed for a few days, long enough for the other hotel guests to lose interest. Entertaining strangers was bad enough without everyone bringing up the past. Elizabeth thought of the reception line at the funeral and how relieved she was to shake the last few hands, not realizing then how many more condolences she would have to work through, an endless line.

  Their time spent between America and Europe, which Isadora chooses to remember with an abundance of fondness

  A life in hotels!

  We landed in New York and took a room big enough to lay out two mattresses, Mother on one and the four of us on the other. Most mornings, we rented out the room to teachers of speech and rhetoric, the students working through their fragments and surely wondering about the mattresses, which were leaned up against the wall as if the room had gone sideways. The students would clear out before we welcomed the afternoon’s dancers, and then Elizabeth was so personable with the girls’ wealthy mothers that they hardly noticed the condition of the room. We could have put up partitions and sold the early evening hours to boarders on the graveyard shift who needed a place to collapse, or laid panels of scrap over the beds and served coffee to patrons seated on the floor. Of course hindsight always reveals the best route. I always think of that first room as being just above Carnegie Hall, though this may not have been true; an old neighbor did play a viola most evenings, and in New York a proximity to greatness was always easy to imagine whether it was real or not.

  After some success we moved the school to an unfurnished gallery in the Windsor Hotel. Gus found a dinner theater and Raymond found a library. The Windsor gave us a good deal on the expansive front room, in part because they wanted a cosmopolitan display and also because they hadn’t yet had curtains installed. Mother, Elizabeth and I taught our barefoot dance to a growing brood, and we all did our level best to ignore the men leering from the street.

  We believed that natural movement was the only path toward an ideal of beauty, and we pursued this idea seven days a week. It was around then we began encountering a certain type of dismissal from the mothers of our students. The mothers would wonder aloud why we didn’t simply teach ballet, as we clearly had an aptitude for it. It was true, and Mother was even classically trained, though if ballet required a license, she wouldn’t even know where to find a modern handbook to study.

  These women—and it was always women who felt obliged to correct us—had apparently decided that there was one track on which artistic merit might run, making orderly stops to pick up and deliver their daughters. Ballet would transform their ducklings into graceful swans or at least cygnets in the corps. They couldn’t understand the appeal of putting up master-class funds for mastery in a new form; it looked like artless play to them, no matter how many pages of notes we presented.

  That was always the trick of my method. Even at the beginning it presented a simplicity that appeared simple. Watching the girls skip to cross the stage or bend to adjust a strap on a sandal, their mothers felt a nagging sense of familiarity. They could hold ballet at arm’s length and leave it behind when they left the room. But this wasn’t something they recognized from the ballet; they were watching their very own youth dance before their eyes.

  The self-loathing rich were worst of all, having padded their nests with a working knowledge of technical dance. They hated to see their girls at ease, furious to feel conned into watching something they had already lost.

  For us, the Windsor was a disaster even before the fire. It was a place of quiet cruelty, where even the man who unlocked the door for us in the morning looked down on us. When the place finally burned, Mother led our last few charges out, holding hands, and Elizabeth remarked in hindsight that at least none of us were hit by the ladies jumping from their penthouse windows.

  We wouldn’t stay where we weren’t wanted, not for longer than a season. We had protected for too long the idea that New York would hold our fortune, but the hotel disaster showed us that if you can make it in New York, it means only that you’ve made it in New York, a city that holds as much loyalty to its residents as a child holds to a smooth stone in the presence of a pond. And so we hopped that pond to London, where we assumed our artistic merit would be given its due.

  The only thing due to us, it turned out, was a few months on the street. We had more promise than money, which didn’t work for anyone, and we were wild, our public scenes inspired by beer but made truly possible by the fact that we had already known some success, although we hadn’t yet learned that success for artists isn’t a permanent condition but rather one which must be perpetually reinvented.

  Mother was there with us in London but refused to witness the spectacle. She kept to park benches during our first rowdy jags, no doubt wondering into the cricketing night how much she would give to return to the old days, though certainly those days weren’t much nicer and we were at least out finding our fortune instead of waiting for it to happen upon us.

  She began to quietly harbor the hope that some young man would arrive and marry off one of her lovely daughters. This was uncharacteristic of her; though she suffered through a true Victorian divorce and all the shame that accompanied it, Mother had nevertheless begun to make the mistake of thinking things were better when she was married. She had been scorned daily by Father’s infidelity and his financial misdealings, but at least she had a roof, and the gossips were always so keen to know about her life that she could occasionally mistake them for friends.

  She was still a handsome woman and charming enough, and we were humiliated daily to find her sitting with some young clerk or barrister who was eager to meet her beautiful young daughters and horrified to find us holding our own shoes and picking feathers from each other’s hair. Sometimes they would give us a little money out of pity, which was the worst of all, but we had gotten far too used to food to ever give it up and so accepted what we were given.

  Between this occasional charity and a brief nannying job on Elizabeth’s part we pulled together enough for a locking door in London. Sleep at last! Or so we thought. The hotel offered a shockingly low rate, and soon we found why; the room was situated directly above a newspaper’s printing house, which would come to life around midnight when they started work on the morning edition. The industrial roar shook us all awake the first few nights, vibrating our series of stolen ceramics to the edge of their shelf before they each dropped without ceremony to the floor. After a few weeks of this, only one piece remained, a palm-size figure of a woman cast in porcelain that Raymond had nicked from a vendor of sentimental wares. She was our prize, sentimentality being in high regard for us at the time; poverty always was attended by a kind of desperate magic. We started keeping our porcelain goddess under the kitchen table, and every night she danced across the sloped and shivering floor. Eventually we grew accustomed to the printing press. I even invented a seizing dance to honor the goddess, but nobody much cared for it, and I stopped performing it by the time we were booked outside London.

  We moved from London to Paris to Munich. Hotels were such a condition of life that it began to feel as if I lived in a cursed room that changed nightly, shifting furnishings and fixtures, swapping out occupants and altering the view from its windows to confound me every morning. There was always something to contend with in the hotels, which marked the city for us forever. In Athens, a pair of brothers paid Gus and Raymond to fight each other until they were too bloodied to tell
who was who. In Vienna, a red-haired girl came to my bed one night and said God had asked her politely to murder me.

  I remember it as a happy time, but those were precarious days, and total collapse was always near. Home was where we paid to stay, and there was an unstoppable vibration under us, something out of our control moving us from place to place. Newspaper ink makes me sick to my stomach to this very day.

  Those weary first days of success were plagued with the suspicion that my career might be better served in New York or Budapest, perhaps taking a more serious study of the body, adding upward of eight hours each day by replacing the evening bacchanals with theories of being and tall glasses of cold buttermilk. Every day I convinced myself I was wasting my time wherever we were, so any move at all could be made on a whim. I would decide to put on a series in Athens, and our traveling circus would pull up its stakes, load out the room’s elephants, and head for more lucrative markets. But the same show followed me no matter what, with a varied supporting cast and the same directionless longing playing the lead.

  In France, Singer closes down the apartment

  It took a month to get them all out. Paris tried to be polite at first, apologizing for the lack of coffee or breakfast, but the guests thanked him and remarked that they weren’t much hungry anyway. They slept stretched out on the floor and went down to the café for butter pastries. He recognized some of them as fellow patrons of the arts, men he knew only in profile from their seats at the Palais Garnier. At first he appreciated the distraction of their presence, but as time passed, his opinion changed. They had become tourists to his tragedy, inserting themselves into his grief. Once it was clear they wouldn’t heed his subtler cues to leave, he hired a pair of women to clean and close the apartment, with the idea that his guests could take on the monthly rent once he was gone.

  The women arrived with a cartload of supplies and immediately got to work on the kitchen. They scrubbed and polished and shook out the rugs. Someone had gouged a hole in the parlor wall, but one of them revealed a pot of mastic and repaired it while the other pulled furniture away from the walls and scrubbed the baseboard corners. Their noise cleared a few visitors out, but not everyone got the message, and soon enough the cleaning women were herding ten stalwart guests from room to room as they went.

  The children’s room was the last to be closed. The stalwarts milled about like the party guests they were, thumbing through the picture books and going on about the children in reverent tones while the cleaning women worked diligently to remove the soot from the walls.

  Night came on, and the guests still wouldn’t leave. The cleaning women had gone home, having better things to do. By then the guests were clustered in the entry hall, enjoying an endless conversation about the worst cafés in the neighborhood. Exasperated, Paris bid his guests good night, claiming that the place needed to be fumigated. They looked at him with surprise and disgust, as if they weren’t the vermin he was trying to remove. He heard someone remarking on his rudeness as they were heading down the stairs. Paris regretted his tone, which was sharper than it would have been had he taken a stand at a more appropriate hour. Entertaining hadn’t been the salve he had hoped it would be. Everyone wanted to try grief on for a little while, but nobody wanted to claim it.

  In the morning, the cleaning women returned. He had them empty the ashtrays, scrub the bathroom, wipe down the silver and pack the children’s toys and clothing into a pair of trunks. One of them pried the nails from the window in the children’s room and hit it with a mallet until it unstuck and slammed shut with such force that it cracked the glass.

  They washed the floors while he went through the bin of correspondence that had accumulated by the door. There were a staggering number of cards and envelopes, some addressed to him and some to Isadora, never to both. Paris would be busy through the season, inventing thoughtful phrases to give his assistant in response to the longer letters. Because Isadora would no doubt prefer to keep her letters sealed, wrapping them in a black ribbon and tucking them under a stack of folios to be forgotten, he would deal with hers as well.

  One of her letters came from Harry Kessler, Ted Craig’s patron. Paris opened it, remembering Ted’s wire asking for travel money. Kessler’s letter was pleasantly perfunctory, featuring short, clean lines of regret and support. Paris appreciated a man who could keep sentiment within its rational bounds.

  Gus and the women had been on Corfu for the whole month, no doubt enjoying the summer breeze and other island pleasantries. Elizabeth had wired to say that Isadora had taken ill and he should come to see her. He considered it, but decided for the moment that there was too much to be done in France. He would have the trunks put in storage, his own things sent back to Oldway. Happily he wouldn’t have to worry about the furniture, and the landlord would forgive the bail on the place. They had done such a good job of showing it to the neighborhood over the past month that it would be rented out soon enough. Once things finally wound down, Paris would turn his attention to the weeks and months ahead in England, improvements to the building and property, and long evenings passed mercifully alone.

  Isadora’s sickbed on Corfu, where illness threatens jovially to level her

  If I was wrong all this time and there is a life after death, I can entertain the celestial crew for hours by describing every detail of this two-bit hotel room. Sad furniture crowds around the bed, and while the hotelier made such a presentation of the private bath, I would rather have a soak in front of everyone if it gave me witnesses to the spiders. The bathroom has a single porthole window, only large enough to fit my arm through. Outside, gulls dive sideways into hell and wheel up carrying bits of charmed fish.

  Perhaps I am convalescing in the inferno, in the ring of suffering where the damned beat rugs with tennis rackets and roll wooden carts up endless cobblestone paths while a meaningless siren drones on and on, and just when I can’t take it anymore, the siren fades to a disappointed moan and the ferry plank bangs onto the dock to allow its passengers to disembark. The charm of this port wore off within an hour of our arrival, and now, after a month, I would rather be curled up in muddy water at the bottom of a well.

  My nurse has been sampling from the dish of kumquats by the bed while I sleep. She thinks a fruit here or there won’t be noted, as if the sunny still life wasn’t the only bright spot in the room. Every time I wake up, another fruit is gone. Then again, there is no such thing as a still life, as even paintings are only as still as conditions allow.

  The nurse is very old and squints at the thermometer as if it’s whispering something to her. If she even saw the biscuit tin of ashes on the bathroom sink, she must have dismissed it. She would never throw it out, considering her resistance to cleaning, which seems class-based and rather fixed. And so the children remain in their tin by the porthole window, the only place in this awful room with a partial view of the sea.

  The hotelier scrambled to care for me in my illness, not wanting a dead woman to mar his hotel’s curative reputation, but his effort is half staffed; I remember seeing my nurse working last week in the hotel kitchen, basting a roast with the same close attention she now gives my thermometer. She seems kind enough despite the fact that her black linen cowl gives her the impression of a friendly hooded Death, and she seems optimistic about my persistent cough despite the fact that it’s getting worse. Bedrest hasn’t killed me yet, and so therefore I must be stronger, but as of late, I only feel weighed down by my own weight. They say sunlight is good for your nerves, but too much of a good thing will drive anyone to madness. It’s hard to tell how much sun the old nurse has gotten, if she accepts only a slice of it through narrowed eyes on her walk to work or strips naked at noon and lies out on the roof, but either way, she’s stealing the fruit.

  “Ilekobathee,” she says, replacing the pot under the bed and laying a cool cloth on my forehead. The joints clip inside her wrist as she shakes the thermometer down, the sound of small stones. She’s talking to herself, aware of the silent
and useless nature of her audience. She’s even older than I thought, on closer inspection, an age where a birthday should mean a parade around the town square followed by a long nap, her bed surrounded by her largest and most pleasant family photographs so that if she happens to wake in the middle of a sudden gasping death, they are all there, in their best clothes, sepia-toned or folded down the middle, but happy to see her, smiling down in groups of two and three on the dresser or the windowsill, gazing with bravery and love at their dearest daughter, their friend, their sister, there with her at the end as they promised they would be.

  The nurse has decided I will be washed, and so I am washed. She hauls me up by my armpits to get my back, where all week I’ve suffered an insect bite like a half-buried stone. She scrubs at me with her salt-stained cloth until my skin is raw, then leans close to pick something off my side with her fingernail, then scrubs some more. Soap flakes float in the gray water of her dish. Wringing out the cloth, she wipes her hand on the quilt and draws from her pocket a yellow copysheet from the Marconi office:

  PARIS MAY 16 I DUNCAN LYING SERIOUSLY III AT CORFU

  An error in the type made my illness into a triptych. Consider the triple scene Teddy could design: left panel a dancer bent back in cambré; middle a mare with her foals; far right some waterscape town featuring residents, warring general against the Turks. Folding the page, I tuck it under the pillow, where it wraps around my silver flask. “We can expect some letters, then.”

  She responds in Greek, Ilekobathee.

  “Maybe a visitor or two if they can stand the ferry.”

  Taking up her cloth again, she scrubs my breast, where one wiry curl springs like a coarse weed, having resisted my plucking, nothing on this earth as persistent as a nipple’s single hair.

  Oh, imagine if I had the audacity to die! The ladies would have to bring out their black again. At the children’s service there was so much bad behavior when they thought I wasn’t looking, but Étienne was paid off easily and reported it all. Jules and Gabriel apparently came only to make the papers, chatting with the reporters and spelling their names for the write-up that would come in the social pages. Yvette signed her name for the reporter as if it were for an autograph book. Only Albert Calmette was a friend and refused to give his name. Years ago he wrote a critical piece on the Ballets Russes, calling Nijinsky’s body hideous from the front and even more hideous when seen in profile, and no matter what injuries life will surely bring, I will always have that happy morning reading his takedown over toast and tea. I kept that delightful piece tacked to my dressing room wall for a month, until Nijinsky himself stopped by and I had to quickly hide it behind a lamp. I felt guilty for a moment, but he was coming only to see the size of my dressing room and also to ask me to tell Gus to stop contacting him.